| By James Owen, Vince Casarez |
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| February 21, 2008 04:00 AM EST |
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7,790 |
As mentioned earlier, information linking is an important aspect of any
informal social networks. If all this information was in a single
place, applying security policies would be straightforward. Since this
is not practical, technologies that enable linking information are
required to store parts of this information outside of the normal
security policies, even if it is as simple as a linked URL. If someone
were to link a public page to a document on M&A, any knowledge of
the existence of that page must not be discoverable by users without
access permissions. Here are a couple of practices to consider.
1. The link resolution can rely on query time filtering.
When the links from the page are requested, all the links are queried
to discover if the requesting user has access. Those that aren't
accessible are discarded from the results. This approach has a high
level of security and for items that have small miss rates can be a
very acceptable approach. However, this implies that there are two
queries that get executed for each user access: one for the content,
and a second for the access permissions. There are query optimizations
to be done but it will impact performance in some way.
2. Another approach is to keep the original security policies with the link repository.
This produces more efficient queries, with the downside that the
security policies must be kept in sync with the original repository.
Normally, this would result in a small window of security mismatch.
It is important to understand how much of a burden you place
on the end user to understand the underlying security models. Take for
example a user creating a page and adding a document to it. If the
security for the page and document are coming from the same
infrastructure, then the model exposed to the user is consistent and
simple. If they are separate, the application must either keep the two
in sync, or the user must understand the page security and the document
repository security in order to share information with others.
There are some best practices that can be implemented when considering how to secure information in a composite application:
Using formal social networks to define information access
rights, thereby ensuring that the information itself is secured. To
gain access to the information, users must be part of a specific group
and be authenticated as such.
For an even greater level of control, information rights
management products may be utilized. These products encrypt the actual
information such that only those with access rights can access it. This
has the added measure of security so that if the information leaves the
repository, the initially defined access rights (emailing a document,
for example) are still enforced.
Discovery or Search
All information must be
integrated with common discovery or search infrastructures. The primary
integration mechanisms involve one or both of the following:
- Integrating information artifacts within a single search index
- Federating real-time searches to the underlying information stores and returning an organized result
Primary discovery mechanisms include search, tag clouds,
pivoting/lateral searches and links navigation. Many of these discovery
mechanisms are blending together. The typical usage pattern for weeding
through the plethora of information in a Web 2.0 world generally
involves combining search and navigation together. A user could start
searching for a document he/she remembers as relevant from several
months ago. After viewing the initial results, they may want to filter
the results based on the author they recall wrote the document, they
may want to simply start pivoting on tag words related to the search
terms used, or they may want to follow links for a document that seems
related.
Since many of the discovery connections and end points may be a person,
the means to interact with the person in-context such as instant
messaging/chat, phone and e-mail should be considered key components of
the Enterprise Social Network.
Conclusion
In order for social networking
technologies to be successful within the enterprise, adoption is a key
requirement. Ensuring that personal productivity tools are built into
social networking features can be a way to significantly increase
adoption. Information workers' primary focus is accomplishing their
tasks in an efficient way with disparate information. The better social
networking technologies are at facilitating an individual's own
information organization, the more likely they are to be utilized in
the enterprise. For example, if a user is able to effectively manage
their shortcuts to information with tag words, they receive a primary
benefit of this technology and will use it. The fact that other
co-workers may now discover information deemed important by a subject
matter expert is a benefit to the company.
At the heart of a successful social network lies the ability to easily
connect information and people together based on a whole set of
industry standards. Bringing Web 2.0 features to the enterprise that
leverage existing enterprise information and application infrastructure
allows companies to tap into all users' expertise and experience, which
makes everyone more productive.
Over the past 12 years, Vince has held many key positions at Oracle. Currently, he is Vice President of Product Management for WebCenter, Portal, and Reports. He also has responsibility for managing the WebCenter development team handling the Web 2.0 services. Prior to this, he focused on hosted portal development and operations which included Oracle Portal Online for external customers, Portal Center for building a portal community, and My Oracle for the employee intranet. Previously, he was Vice President of Tools Marketing handling all tools products including development tools and business intelligence tools. Prior to running Tools Marketing, he was Director of Product Management for Oracle's JDeveloper. Before joining Oracle, Vince spent 7 years at Borland International where he was group product manager of Paradox for Windows and dBASE for Windows.
There are a variety of applications that supp...
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